If you believe life begins at conception, I am now a father of nine.

Our egg donor flew to Connecticut on Friday night and underwent lab tests over the weekend. Yesterday, she was “retrieved”. That means that the IVF clinic took eleven eggs from her. It seems weird to say that the eggs were “retrieved” – that makes it sound like I was hiding them in her ovaries for a while and now I want them back – but that’s the terminology they use. Of those eleven eggs, two of them “degenerated”. I’ve seen pictures of this online and it’s not pretty. They look like broken chicken eggs, like the doctor dropped them on the way to the petri dish.

The 9 remaining eggs were ICSI’d and resulted in embryos. Now we wait for them to grow. If they divide to 8 cells or more, they are eligible for transfer. B. leaves for Connecticut tomorrow and will undergo additional lab testing on Thursday. If all is well, the transfer could happen on Friday. If the embryos need a little more time to grow, it could be Saturday.

The embryos that aren’t transferred will be frozen. With current technology, a frozen embryo is just as likely to result in a pregnancy as a “fresh” one, so we will have these embryos available as a back-up if the first transfer doesn’t take.

It’s hard not to think about the embryos growing and dividing in Connecticut while I’m sitting here at my desk in Massachusetts. Is this the way the entire pregnancy is going to be?